I'm going to be having a go at Blaugust this month, so I wanted to give a heads-up about the increase in posts.
Habit formation is for chumps so I won't be trying to do 1-a-day, but I am aiming to hit a solid average with some bursts of activity at the weekends.
That said, I'm immediately breaking two of my cardinal rules for this site: I don't post for the sake of posting, and I don't blog about blogging.
That's no dig at people who do these things, I can just feel my brain dripping out my ears when I start doing it - it just feels so obligatory as "content" and this site is specifically about escaping those patterns in myself. I can (and will) go a month or two without posting if there's nothing I want to write about, normally. The exercise this month is in lowering the bar, and writing about a topic even if I don't have a "full post" in mind.
So, over the next few weeks expect to see lower-effort (therefore better???) posts, some tidied drafts, and a bunch of small ideas that I'd normally think "there's a post in that" then forget immediately.
Seen a lot of chatter about Obsidian for Notes and blog writing lately, and thought I'd give it a look.
I'd previously been using QOwnNotes - a very functional, fully text-driven Tag-based notes app that had been getting on my nerves a bit since they added optional-but-easy AI integration.
As it stores notes as just a folder of .md files, the notebook was very portable to Obsidian, though Tags don't seem to translate.
I'm not even remotely leveraging all the things Obsidian can do so far, but I'm enjoying the experience. The easy swapping between source and render modes is a big plus already, and it just feels that bit more user-friendly than QOwnNotes did. It had functions to do basic formatting and inserts via the toolbars, but very little was surfaced in the right-click menu and it was really starting to get on my nerves tbh!
I'll keep using it for a now, as going back should be easy if I find it objectionable, but honestly I don't see any reason why I'd stop using this - where it's good, it's very solid, and elsewhere it seems entirely inoffensive. I don't really want to worry about the "features" of my notebook.
This and the next one are born from me finally getting a NAS setup/homeserver setup I'm vaguely satisfied with, and having the confidence to finally tinker and setup my own services.
NextCloud is a self-hosted cloud storage app that basically lets you manage your own dropbox. I don't know a huge amount about it's security or reliability, but I've been desperately looking for something more responsive than daily backups, and more secure than... just... kind of hoping nothing breaks?
It's pretty cool to see sync files and access them across multiple devices so easily and naturally.
That said, I've found the syncing to be... inconsistent? The desktop app driving it just seems to have given up syncing my Notes folder (that I use to draft these posts) since I reorganised it to play nicer with Obsidian. This may be an issue with how I've set things up, or my NAS playing up, but I don't love having to figure this out when I have like a few megabytes stored - it's not going to get easier with more stuff in there. Anyway my gut says the linux flatpak app just sucks, so I might have to figure something else out.
Very similar to QOwnNotes, I've been using Inoreader for my RSS since getting back into it, and while it had a lot of design and features that I liked they started doing a bunch of AI bullshit recently, so I've been looking for an offramp.
With my homeserver set up and functioning properly, I'd previously looked for a self-hosted option but never came up with much, until recently finding out about FreshRSS.
It's not as pretty and full-featured as Inoreader, but it pretty much does the job. It's at least a decade old and has the inexorable feel of sticking power that entails. One thing it lacks is the ability to search for a website more broadly and have it recommend the feed from previous follows - but that's a small sacrifice and something I can just use Inoreader for when it comes up.
One thing I would really like is a proper thumbnail view like Inoreader has - it's very basic of me but I like seeing what people put for the image on their posts. It doesn't affect my clicking habits, but I like the visual when I have a lot to catch up on.
I haven't looked much into extensions for it, because they're kind of a ball-ache to install with my setup, but also because none of them jumped out at me on a first skim.
One thing that gives FreshRSS a boost in my books is that I really like to actually visit the website from my RSS feed, and I strongly dislike the push to inline everything to the reader. I get that we call them "readers" but really for me it's a homepage, a place to jump off and go visit other people's sites. It feels more personal.
This one gets a bit rambly, but I think people need to be openly thinking about more than just "what just happened?" and more about "how do we prevent or mitigate this happening again?"
Last week, Steam started its way down the slippery slope of removing edgy adult games at the behest of payment processors, themselves responding to a reportedly pretty small amount of pressure from a far-right religious group targeting "incest" games. A few days ago, itch.io followed suit with an approach more extreme in its caution - completely removing all adult content until they can do a full review and remove anything considered "outside the terms of service of their payment processor."
A day later, the UK's Online Safety Act went into force, causing (among other things) large sites involving user interaction or adult content (i.e. all of them) to require extremely invasive amounts of information to verify ages and keep children away from dangerous content. We're talking highly identifiable information - Photo ID is being suggested unironically alongside bank details and credit card info (!!!), the sorts of things no child has ever fraudulently obtained from their parents.
These are two very superficially related problems with fundamentally different sources, which I want to explore, but I do believe the solutions end up horseshoeing back to being similar.
Banning Adults Buying Adult Media about Adults
But first, I want to be explicit about something - in art and media it has always been the case that we permit the depiction and exploration of acts that in reality would be definitively transgressive, immoral, illegal, or worthy of scorn. The idea that these depictions can be causally linked to increases in such behaviour among viewers is itself worthy of derision. All attempts to do so in the past are rightly looked back on as conservative, authoritarian, and reactionary - Video Nasties, Violence in Video Games, even the Hays Code - all are now considered at best laughable or at worst actively damaging to the causes they claimed to support.
This leads to the first, foundational rebuttal we should bear in mind discussing the Steam and itch.io purges - it doesn't matter if a game lets the player character fuck their fictional sister.
On a store that lets people buy games where they assault, kill, maim, and commit other acts of imaginative violence, pulling out the ban hammer because imaginary siblings are getting someone off somewhere is a reactionary conservatism, and equivocating on the degree to which this is unacceptable because it gives you the ick is reactionary cowardice.
Banning transgressive media then linking it to queer media so they can ban that too is explicitly the gameplan of conservative activists, so it's extra important to not buy into their vision of "responsible media" is and tell them to fuck off at the first step.
Platforms have the right to set limits on what they deem to be acceptable when they're the ones distributing the media, but they also have a responsibility to communicate and enforce those limits consistently and clearly.
That's not what's happening here. Mastercard and Visa are afraid of being found liable for enabling transactions that allow "illegal activity," because as I understand it a prior judgment ruled that way (desperately seeking citation here, could be misinformed). They are incentivised to be wildly conservative because they run a near-global duopoly on online payments, and will lose no business over stepping on such a small group.
Steam has historically been pretty decent on this stuff - a solid B+ to my recollection. They saw the difficulty of trying to draw the line between "adult" and "normal???" games and instead of coming down with a heavy hand, they accepted they'd never be able to solve it and let their store's users (both devs and players) take the wheel on categorising their own media. It was in everyone's interest to do so accurately, so devs could find their audiences and players could find their media.
I'll admit the store has been less pleasant to use since then, but overall I think this was the correct tack for Steam to take.
This time, I think Steam probably should have tried to fight it - it's possible an organisation as big and influential as them could have helped redefine the legal precedent and got payment processors out of the whole conversation. The idea that they're responsible for someone buying illicit 3D renders of fictionally related fictional characters is genuinely baffling when steam operates as such a middleman.
Hell, Steam has its own wallet system - it would have been fascinating to see them move questionable media to be wallet-only purchases while they figured out the specifics. I don't know if they'd have been successful in fighting that the media is lawful in the current political climate, but I am confident that itch.io's capitulation was driven by the success this pressure had with Steam.
Won't The UK Please Think Of The Children
If you're not British, or you are but politics has you in that generally depressive spiral of scrolling past anything resembling a picture of the houses of parliament, you might need small primer on the current ruling party.
They don't have policies, goals, or any particular platform. They won an election because the other major party imploded harder than them at an opportune moment, and they're terrified that they'll lose the next election to a bunch of far-right racists.
Their premiership has been defined by doing relatively little, getting what they have done wrong, and kicking people out of the party for voting against their woefully unpopular ideas.
There's an additional note of context for the specifics of the Online Safety Act that just went into force. It wasn't the Labour Party's law.
Back in 2023 the Conservative Party was in charge and this was one of their laws, but in the process of pushing it through our parliamentary system a bunch of additional bits of language were added or changed - especially around extending the scope and vagueness of what might be considered "unsafe" - with all the precision and expertise you'd expect from the demographics populating a "House of Lords."
By the time we get to the present day we have a feckless government trying to taxonomise the entire internet, defining chairs while trying to dodge defining sofas, and putting unacceptable amounts of pressure on small site admins paying for passion projects from their own pockets.
They think they've sidestepped this by sectioning off websites by their traffic and content delivery mechanisms, but Wikipedia pointed out that they'd technically fall under those rules despite being expressly the kind of website the law tries not to harm!
The actual mechanisms by which this is going to be enforced are so comically broad and exploitable that I honestly expect they'll become as ubiquitously ignored as GDPR compliance pop-ups. I fully expect browser plug-ins (containing zero malware, I'm sure) to automate the process of bypassing them.
All of this is the result of overconfident lawmakers identifying a problem - a real fucking problem, it must be said - and being confident they have what it takes to solve it. They can define the exact contours by which a website becomes "unsafe for children" based on their massive political brains, and it's certain not to change over time. After all, it's not like the giant corporations being regulated have a history of exploiting loopholes and regulatory oversights...
What this called for was probably a new regulator, with the power to define and sanction improper moderation. These current powers are going to fall on Ofcom I think, but I think we'd need some kind of Ofnet to interact directly with websites, companies, and site admins and ensure they're behaving responsibly within the bounds of their abilities. You cannot paint this map with a broad brush and it's a full time job in this ever-changing landscape.
The benefit of a regulator is that it can be staffed by people who understand the medium they're regulating, rather than careerist politicians trying to get Daddy Starmer's attention for a cabinet position.
Anyway we're not getting a sensible solution, we're getting a map of the territory drawn from the castle window, so what can we do about it?
What now?
I think the big lesson from all of this is that we can't trust platforms to protect us.
When Steam started banning things it was just assumed that this was the time for people to move to "the real ally platform" of itch.io, but it took literally a week for them to capitulate even worse, because as a smaller player they're more vulnerable.
But ultimately, itch.io is still just a faceless platform that stores, distributes, and takes and provides payments for media.
You can't fix this by just moving your transgressive smut to Patreon, they have the same incentives and pressures.
Ultimately, the closing of doors at Steam and itch.io are just going to push users to using shadier websites to download their illicit media, and that opens those users up to massively more risk of compromise by bad actors.
The main potential I see for solving this is community driven navigation to more granularly hosted media. A kind of catalogue with clear guidelines about what is and isn't allowed (I'm sure no drama would come from those lines being drawn... cohost flashbacks intensify ), no on-site hosting of materials, and some kind of moderation of link quality and content relevance. Creator-owned pages and well-vetted data.
Such a thing probably already exists tbh - for all these moves have annoyed me the porn game sphere hasn't really been in my oeuvre since I was, ironically, young enough for this legislation to affect me. I follow some people who work in this space (Bigg's feed in particular was a highlight of Cohost for me) so I'm broadly aware of the scene, but I'm fundamentally an outsider to it and my thoughts probably come across that way.
This isn't coming from thinking I know better than the people being affected though, it comes from having seen this happen time and again and coming to the same conclusions - platforms don't work for transgressive spaces because platforms are too vulnerable to political pressure.
So when I describe a non-hosting catalogue/wiki with moderation and safety ratings, I'm really advocating for something portable. There's no one platform that can be pressured into nuking thousands of people's work from being accessed, because it's purely informational and information is easy to replicate. The reputation of such a catalogue would be the primary defence against duplication of the database for nefarious purposes - "why use this shady copycat when everyone trusts the links on xcat?" or similar. Plus, we're talking about a non-profit site here - there's not a lot of money in stealing its traffic.
This is admittedly a grey-area defence like people use for emulation websites - "it's not illegal if you own the cartridge!" To be fair this defence has functioned fairly well in non-profit non-distribution contexts, but I think it holds a bit more water here.
The illegality of whatever media is being catalogued is irrelevant to the catalogue itself - the responsibility for that would be on the people distributing the files itself, be it some external store or personal website. It's so much harder for a campaign like this most recent one to succeed when there's no one point of failure to attack.
In the worst case of attack or implied liability, links could be removed while maintaining the informational page describing and cataloguing the media, allowing users essentially the same circumstances as the best case scenario when something like the itch.io ban happens.
This is where I think it ties in with the UK Online Safety Act - this isn't about ban-evasion or engaging in bad-faith with regulations, it's about having a culture and community that's nimble and not complacent about what is expected of them - or what may be in future.
As far as how a website like this would be compliant with the act? That's tricky for me to judge. Not hosting any adult content itself, it may be able to rely on the age-gating of any linked websites for cover. It may also be able to default to a fully compliant, no images/explicit descriptions layer unless users consent to some minimally compliant age verification.
A catalogue that can function purely on text is a great deal more robust to this kind of exploitation anyway, so that's probably a win-win feature.
The biggest gap remaining around this is, like, the store part? The whole catalogue idea exists specifically to excise the vector of money from the domain of archival, so it actively shuns the question of payment for the work.
Maybe it links to a Patreon page for your favourite VN creator, and if Patreon pulls another Patreon on them it can be updated to link to some Dutch online storefront while they figure out a new revenue stream.
To be honest, from what I can tell most adult games on itch.io were already functionally links to a Patreon, because there's so much more money to be had from monthly subscriptions than a one-off payment.
Successful devs were already so hostile to itch.io as a platform that the transition to a catalogue that just sends users where they need to go might be more natural than I initially thought.
Closing Thoughts
Apologies for what is essentially a dump of every conversation that I've had with my partner over the last few days, condensed into something vaguely constructive.
I don't know what will really happen next, where the displaced sex-workers of the games industry will go or what they'll do.
I just firmly discard the notion that the future lies in trusting a different platform to not fuck them over.
I'm writing this at 5am, a couple of hours after waking up from a migraine-induced sleep.
I don't mean to portray my relationship with migraines as particularly bad, just to frame the mood and position I'm in. I get maybe 3 or 4 migraines a year and when I do I lose at most a couple of days of high-functioning to them. I can pretty much always look back and figure out roughly what set it off - usually stress or exhaustion, and yesterday I was operating on less sleep than I'd like. Usually I can sense it coming on, a mild queasiness and difficulty reading, and I just go to a dark room and wait it out. I don't have any meds for it because my last batch expired before I needed any of it, if that helps give a sense of how not-terrible my position is.
All that being said, aura is fucked up.
If you don't know, aura is all the non-pain sensory shit that can accompany the actual headache portion, and it's not universal. It's highly personal, variable, and at times subtle. While aura isn't a necessary part of migraine - statistically, most migraines are without aura - pairing visual disturbances with headaches was what allowed my doctor to put the word "migraine" on my file, and let me research how to deal with them better.
Generally I just get some blind spots and visual sparkling in the half hour before the pain, but a couple of months ago I got a much weirder disturbance. I was dming a friend about F1 and was having to focus pretty hard to read the text, until he wrote one slightly awkwardly worded sentence and I just couldn't wrap my brain around it. I sat for 10 minutes trying to understand, to break it down, or even speak it out loud - I couldn't get my mouth around the words.
In reply to me saying Red Bull might view doing another driver swap Hadjar<->Tsunoda as a no-loss scenario.
I mean, the loss is that they don't give Hadjar the time and the tools, so they end up ruining his career too, whereas if they give him this year to develop, stick him in that car next year for testing etc, he could really do the job for them
I thought I was having a stroke or something. Jumped on a voice call with him for a bit, made sure I was speaking clearly for an hour or so, played some Rocket League (hit some bangers, ofc) then the headache started rolling in and I knew what was up.
There's something about that break in my literacy that really shook me. Reading has always come extremely naturally to me, having it just drop out from under me over the course of a couple of sentences kind of hit an existential note. It's a little advanced warning of the kind of cognitive decline I'll need to look out for in my dotage, and that shit already terrifies me.
I joke a lot about how "x really makes me understand that I'm just a machine made of meat" but aura is this acute demonstration of how fucking complicated the machine is. The most complex computational device in the known universe is driving the robot that can damage itself by biting the inside of its own mouth.
I think there's something fundamentally weird about how game trailers will utterly misrepresent the product in order to sell a vibe, and we just accept it as part of the bargain. As long as the trailer at some point puts a little "not gameplay" caption in 10pt text somewhere, they're basically in the clear, especially if they finish the trailer with like 10s of actual gameplay. In that case it was basically a cutscene, which is technically part of the game you'd be buying.
A really annoying version of this is this kind of bait-and-switch trailer, where they'll show what appears to be an interesting setting or character or game concept, then at the end they pull out an assault rifle and start jumping around building wooden shacks because oh you didn't know? It's Fortnite again.
One of these that really stuck with me was a trailer I saw a few years ago, that had a necromancer character finding a body, doing some ritual, and taking skull as some kind of ritual object. While this is happening, a voiceover is grimly talking about the dark path and sacrifices of this magic, that to know these secrets you accept being shunned and feared - and they show this with a family cowering into their home as the character walks past.
My mind starts buzzing with this idea - this is a cool premise surely, a game where we can perhaps do some dark rituals that give us deep knowledge about the nature of the cosmos, but in doing so distance ourselves from society. Perhaps in taking this skull we can unlock new powers by tying up the victim's loose ends in a kind of Quantum Leap but for corpses, jumping from story to story and learning the dark secrets of a society while righting its wrongs despite looking incredibly wrong ourselves. Maybe there's even some kind of moral trade-off involved - letting the spirits move on or harvesting them at their fullest - that'd be exciting and distinct! To even start down the path of righting these wrongs we have to desecrate a corpse so it sets up some really interesting and unusual stakes.
Anyway if you keep up with the whole video game trailer release hype cycles, you probably already recognised that trailer as what it was - not the reveal of a new dark narrative spirit whisperer game, but basically a hype trailer for the Necromancer character in the (at that time unreleased) Diablo 4.
It was 100% flavour. None of what appeared in that part of the trailer is in the game in any meaningful way - you won't be dealing with social ostracisation, you don't unveil any particular dark truth about the univers, you even come to the adventure pre-skulled.
I'm not saying that Diablo 4 needed to have a social consequence system or a corpse-flaying minigame, but I do feel that it's a bit weak to have a whole theme of the character trailer be about being shunned, then in game you get to the major city all corpsed up and nobody particularly gives a shit - you are so visibly doing some dark bullshit and vendors are just like "yeah I can sharpen a scythe no problem." It's all so procedural and presumed that all of the character design is reduced to pure flavour.
My partner and I spend a lot of our time talking about videogames, and especially about Themes and Throughlines - where the writer's intent and intentionality become design and mechanics.
She's been doing a lot of writing in the last couple of years and is very good at it, and I have a very overinflated opinion of my ability to finish a project, so we've often discussed the idea of what kind of game we might make together. While my preference for my own writing would be something relatively breezy and low-narrative (because I balk at sincerely expressing myself), she'd be the writer and is very much into Themes and Throughlines and Arcs and Resolutions in a way that makes me think maybe my misreading of the Necromancer trailer would be a good project for us.
I think there's something fundamentally exciting in how the viewer can take in the aesthetic and thematic elements of a piece and synthesise something entirely new and distinct from it. This is pretty much the origin of fan-fiction, right? The most prolific fic communities always seem to be based on the least complete or satisfying source narratives - nothing motivates creativity like loving something but knowing it could be better.
Linda Linda Linda is a 2005 film about a Japanese high school band in the 3 days running up to a performance at the end of their senior year, at the conclusion of the multi-day Holly Festival. Their guitarist Moe has injured her hand and their singer Rinko has quit over a falling out with the keyboardist Kei, but rather than cancel the show they make a pivot - Kei will play guitar, and they ask the first person who walks by to sing for them - Son, the Korean exchange student.
Son's Japanese is bad enough that she didn't know what she was agreeing to, and Kei can't play guitar. They decide that rather than performing an original track as planned they'll cover the Blue Hearts, a punk band everyone knows.
Linda Linda Linda is about the things the film doesn't say it's about, because people don't usually tell us when we're having the best days of our lives and we resent it when they do. Throughout the film, people in the periphery of the band's scramble know how important this show will be for them, how the moments they're sharing can't be taken for granted, and any attempt to explicitly address this idea is shut down with the ruthlessness of a teenage girl disinterested in taking things so seriously.
I went into Linda Linda Linda expecting to enjoy it, I was primed by the googling I did after hearing about it, but I wasn't ready for it to sit in the back of my mind the way it has. It's an exceptionally simple story, with low stakes and a sparseness to its pacing - the editing has a film-student's love of lingering shots and extended pauses. The awkwardness of teenage socialisation against the raw emotional expression of punk rock hits extremely hard.
Throughout we get snippets of the Film Club documenting the festival, the director's confident incompetence mirroring those careful, measured, awkward silences.
These are the moments that make us - clumsy as they are, they lay the foundations of the people we will be.
Linda Linda Linda is available, with subtitles, on archive.org. The Blue Hearts are not on Spotify.
As you may have noticed previously, I'm quite the Rocket League enjoyer.
I've tried in the past to write up comprehensive preview or review posts about RLCS events but always find myself getting bogged down in the details of searching for stats to back up or disprove my ideas so they never get posted.
This is a shame imo so I'm going to do this one fairly off-the-cuff, focusing on predictions rather than describing the state of play (though I'll still contextualise where relevant).
My Prediction Format
I like to use a range prediction rather than doing power rankings - just saying "I think this team is 7th best" doesn't really give much flavour imo, because there are teams with low floors that are absolutely capable of winning an event (Spacestation???) that you always have to mark down because of those weaker on-the-day performances. This range prediction gives flexibility.
The rest of this post is largely based on this chart. (I'll try to come up with a more screen-reader friendly format for next time, this is just the image I used to talk ball with friends and this post is purposefully low effort).
One caveat for this chart is that I try to keep the number of "possible positions" down to less than 1/3 of the possible positions (9th-11th is one position) just to avoid spamming. That means I've kind of underestimated some of the upper and lower ranges vs what I actually believe.
EU Seems Strong
The big story of this season has been "can anyone beat KC" and the answer within Europe has been "yeah lol". They've lost to NiP, Geekay, and Dignitas in EU regional events this season, but unfortunately of those 3 only Dignitas qualified for this event. They've looked incredible against the rest of EU but in the last online open got 4-0'd in a classic "KC win it all" top 8 bracket. KC went 12-3 in that bracket, somehow only tied for their 3rd best event this season (and they lost the other 2).
So yeah KC and Dig can win it but I don't have massive confidence in Dig on LAN yet. Vitality are pretty much always a threat if they can get it together for a day so I always put the top of their range at 1st. Gentlemates are the only outlier here as the clearly weakest team in terms of past results, but to be honest they've been popping off lately and took 2 of KC's 3 lost games so who knows. EU's just strong right now.
NA Looks Alright
NRG are gonna NRG - they always look a little flat when the stakes are low, and they've been fully qualified for everything for a while now so I don't take recent results too seriously. Losing to Ultimates was basically fate so it doesn't count - they're the only team outside EU I give a reasonable chance of winning the Major at this point.
SSG are the team to watch though - a very young squad (15, 17, and 19 💀) with an exciting intuitive playstyle, they initially formed from the ashes of frosty getting kicked from NRG before they replaced him with kofyr in the 2nd half of the season and have looked exceptional. While I don't expect them to win it, there's no team I'd be more excited to see make the run. They play Rocket League like I think I'm gonna play Rocket League when I boot it up.
Ultimates look good but I don't have the faith in them, and Gen.G have been a delightful surprise since picking up jstn but they ain't winning a major.
Falcons Kinda Fell Off
It's hard to say a squad with 5/6 regional wins this year and a history of 2nd places is looking weak, but this seems the closest we're gonna get. After 5th in Major 1 I just don't have the faith that Falcons can win a non-Saudi international anymore, and looking closer at their recent results they're getting pushed to deciding games rather often by teams I'd expect them to be stomping. This could be MENA depth in action, but two of those teams are basically 2nd-rate EU import teams so idk.
Twisted Minds are one of those import teams, with their only MENA player being a kid who was so racist it destroyed the most well-liked org in the scene, so idk fuck those guys. They were shit at Major 1 and they'll be shit here.
A small note on SAM here as well - Furia look similar to Falcons with 5/6 opens, losing one due to a tech issue, but SAM just isn't as strong so I can't give them too much credit on that basis. I consider both teams equally strong without international comparisons, with Secret a classic filler team.
Nobody Else Makes Top 8 IMO
It's a hard time to be from a Minor region in Rocket League. If it's not dynastic dominance from Falcons and Furia, it's EU/NA import players booting you aside for a chance to go out 12-16th, or you're OCE and thus exist entirely to score one (1) upset then get eliminated in Swiss.
The smallest two regions (Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia-Pacific) have 1 local representative among their 6 players - sphinx is a really exciting and talented player for sure, but that just means he gets brought in on the exploitation rather than getting stuck watching import players take his money. sphinx's team got APAC's best ever result at the last international (9-11th) and I could not care less. I suppose it's impressive that a couple of washed Major region pensioners were able to win 2 matches, but they were against two OCE squads who couldn't even manage their one (1) Psyonix mandated upset.
For real, fuck these colonisers. I will never give them the grace of predicting them above last place.
I'd even go so far as to say that it's possible - with a terrible Swiss draw - that we have only EU/NA teams in top 8 this time.
I Don't Think That Means It'll Be Boring
I might sound kind of down on Rocket League Esports at the moment but I'm more down on the organisational structures - the players are still doing great stuff and pushing the meta, and more and more we're seeing teams prove that with exposure to greatness they can learn from it - I just need Psyonix to impose real protections on minor region players, or we're going to lose those whole ecosystems.
The team that wins this Major will be very, very good at Rocket League.
So I recently mentioned that I was wanting to disconnect from Microsoft products and that getting away from Windows in particular seemed like too big an ask - not because I don't like or can't use Linux but because I rely on Windows too heavily for gaming.
But I've been thinking about it some more, doing a bit of searching around and scouting the ecosystem, and decided to give it a go - I have an SSD that I could easily clear out and use as a test-bed, do a dual-boot like it's 2005 again, and test the waters myself now that I have a vague understanding of the situation.
The main things to understand for this transition are:
Linux, and the preponderance of distributions.
Proton, the translation layer (that I believe just sits on top of WINE) which enables Steam-native running of Windows-only games.
The general ecosystem of highly-opinionated software branches that seem to drive both.
Linux isn't a concern to me - I dabbled with dual-booting 20 years ago, and have used half a dozen distros since in education or professional contexts. I'm far from a power-user, but I'm not afraid to use a terminal to solve problems. If the best solution was some Arch fork, I would manage fine with a bit of support from documentation.
Proton was much more of a mystery to me, and seems to have 2 main branches - the Valve operated one, and protonge which is maintained by a patreon-supported developer. Thankfully, I soon learned that switching between them is really easy with helpful software tools like Steam, Lutris, and ProtonUp-qt.
So really at this point the only mystery was which team was I gonna choose? Which distro was I going to install, then gaslight myself into believing was the best lest I spend the rest of my life jumping from ship to ship?
I pretty quickly settled on Bazzite, for a few reasons.
It has a pretty professional overall presentation. A lot of modern distros have this, but it was a good start - while I'm capable enough with Linux to not need something too polished, there's no reason to make extra work for myself.
It was designed for Steam Deck, which means it's both Steam-focused (where all of my performance-intensive gaming is based), and relatively lightweight.
It's built on an "immutable" Fedora branch called Atomic which essentially means that I can't just fuck up the OS with the simplest error. A gaming system is so sensitive to minor OS problems that having one I won't break by making a typo holds a lot of appeal. It also speaks to a level of confidence the developers have that there's no need to go hunting around in the CLI to change minor things - if you want it, they need to have a way to provide it.
Finding this gave me the confidence to try it out, and I've been tinkering with it for the last 6 hours or so. So far? I'm impressed.
As far as a desktop experience, it does all the desktop things. It uses Firefox by default, which I'll probably switch out eventually, but it works for now while I also wean myself off Chrome. The software manager is pretty comprehensive and the preinstalled bits are fairly intuitive. I went with the KDE version (having been a gnome kid 20 years ago) and I'm really impressed by how far it's come in this time. Multimedia stuff just works, most standard apps are available as flatpaks, and I haven't run into a problem yet that I can't at least hack a solution to.
For gaming? I haven't done much stress-testing yet. I understand that nVidia cards generally are a bit worse on Linux, and that it's normal to see around 20-30% worse performance depending on the game. My system is an AMD 5800X, NV RX3070, and 32GB of memory and I play at 1440p.
On my system I was getting 90fps with my preferred settings in Baldur's Gate 3 in Windows, down to about 50fps in Bazzite which seems like a worst-case scenario and one I'm going to investigate further.
Rocket League is my comfort-game of choice and it runs super smoothly on proton. I've been complaining about uneven frame-pacing for the last several months on Windows, and I thought it had mostly gone away but I think I'd just got used to it - as soon as I booted it on Bazzite it was like playing at 120Hz for the first time all over again. Buttery. Delightful.
I've heard this is a common upside to gaming on Linux - your FPS will be lower, but the pacing will be significantly better. With a gsync monitor (is that supported? Shit, I should check... quick google ...seems supported) it feels really decent. Honestly this is the best Rocket League has felt for me in at least 6 months, possibly longer.
So a first day conclusion? Really liking this so far. Much more positive experience than I expected.
I've got a lot more tinkering and testing to do, but I'm happy enough with this to use it as my daily driver for the near future and really learn the friction points.
I don't think I'll be able to fully remove Windows just yet, not until I can figure out what's going on with BG3, and I may just leave a vestigial Windows partition for really heavy games until I can afford a 9700XT.
I'm genuinely quite excited for the future now, and what might be possible.
Not linking (reasons obvious) but it's the first time in a while that I've not immediately recognised the more reactionary impulses of a creator like this. It snuck up on me.
I've been expanding my YouTube horizons a bit, checking out people who've clearly gotten popular while I wasn't looking and seeing if I like what they have to say. Not in a place to start promoting them or anything, but it does seem like there's a relatively solid current of new people rising to the surface, and it's particularly nice to see some folks talking about old topics (we're talking Mass Effect, Last of us) with a view I haven't seen a million times already.
Anyway in this spirit I watched a video outlining the artistic issues with the Oblivion remaster, and after nodding along for the first 10-15 minutes about how desaturated and characterless it all is, how generic the enemies look mmhmm very good, there was a little diversion about how using "body type 1/2" or whatever is actually more bioessentialist than "Male/Female" and also a binary ackshually, without any real elaboration. Hmm.
He talks about the removal of gendered outfits and how clunkily executed it all is, and I'm broadly back agreeing. He's clear - some of the originals were tasteless and a redesign would have been a good idea, but the removal and subsequent implementation of just "the dude gear on a different body" doesn't work - hell, they don't work well on the "body type 2" they're designed for. Cool! That's a good little point.
There was a genuinely interminable diversion into societal control through media, including quoting foundational texts on propoganda and referring to people who think it doesn't matter as "golems" and like...
Look, I can give benefit of the doubt to an extent. I'm summarising what he says here and in doing so it makes it probably look worse than it is, but even if the writer doesn't intend to do antisemitism, the comments know because there's more than a handful of people doing antisemitism down there, with big SOLIDARITY messages.
Anyway I wasn't kidding about that diversion being interminable, he juxtaposes a bunch of clips of black employment activists explaining how they pressure companies to improve diversity practices against billionaires saying they force DEI on the companies they invest in because it's the financially savvy thing to do. This is so colossally disingenuous that I don't feel any need to give him the benefit of the doubt here. This dude's fucked. Please don't recommend anything else by him, YouTube, thanks.
Why can't someone normal write about this bloody game lmao
It's just wild to me how even someone with a feed as curated and carefully managed as mine can have this kind of rhetoric actively recommended after a previous version of the same video was apparently taken down for unspecified reasons ofc).
I'm just trying to learn what the zoomers have to say about jade empire guys I don't want rants about the deep state please tune your algorithm accordingly.
Last week I learned that Microsoft was included in the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement's list of proscribed companies.
Today I cancelled my Game Pass subscription.
These two facts are less related than I'd like to claim.
I want to say that when I learned about their involvement in Israel's atrocities in Gaza I took it to heart immediately and took steps to stop giving them my money, and indeed since that day I haven't given them a penny - it's an easy claim.
But the truth is, when I saw it I thought "Man I'm halfway through Clair Obscur and don't want to risk losing my savefile and achievement progress in a savefile transfer." Pathetic shit tbh, but true.
BDS isn't even the #1 reason I'm unsubscribing!
I've long held that Game Pass (and Sony's PS+ equivalent) foster a really pernicious relationship with games, moving them from products to services and increasing their disposability in my life. I'm already paying for it so I might as well just download and try it, but quit at the first moment of friction. I think this worsens existing trends in game design, where we seek to remove any chance that a player might quit, even if it means they never experience joy.
I've been commenting to friends recently how getting the Oblivion Remaster on Game Pass made me less likely to struggle through technical issues and find solutions. That, if I'd actually paid for it, I might have done some tweaking as I did with the same game in 2006, or even refunded it if I found it truly unacceptable. Instead I just put it down and thought "maybe they'll fix it" - utter passivity. I feel so so little about a rerelease of a game that defined my teenage years and friendships, that introduced me to modding and SDKs and player-created experiences and... yeah I'll get to it later I guess.
So I was already, spiritually, about 80% of the way to cancelling my subscription due to the oppressive sense of ennui it gave me whenever I opened the Xbox app, and BDS just tipped me over the edge - but not before I'd finished my game. I can't be truly inconvenienced by my action.
I mean can I even truly boycott Microsoft? It would involve at the very least a lot of research on gaming on alternate operating systems, nevermind the cost of physically removing it from my PC - safely backing things up would require a fair amount of hardware that I don't really have to hand or within budget.
I should at least research it.
I've spent much of the last year celebrating getting my brain about 50% removed from the cultural morass of social media and the corporate internet, and this would be a natural extension of it - but the changes I've already made have improved my life whereas this would be a legitimate difficulty in my day-to-day.
Maybe it would result in a better day-to-day? But that's not why we do activism. And it's generally why I don't do it, which does feel shitty.
I previously watched it on my own last year, my partner wasn't that interested in another high-schooler punchy boy show and I went in otherwise completely blind and loved it. Recently I convinced her she should give it a try, and she got hooked on it pretty quick.
What she's been much better at expressing than me is how confident the writing all feels - characters get to be who they are without ironic smirks or lampshading, and that lets them act on their internal motivations in a really sincere way.
I hadn't watched JJK 0 last time, just missed it from the viewing list, but it's also an excellent bridge between seasons. It's a little hard to justify two prequels in a row, but this does a good job of it. Really poignant stuff, and throughout both prequels they set up a lot of parallels with the present-day cast - showing alternate worldviews or motivations to avoid the trap that "whatever the protagonists believe is correct."
This had us slowly coming to the belief that Anime is the only visual medium left that's willing to do actual sincerity.
Started playing Clair Obscur - 10/10 so far
Then I played the opening of Clair Obscur, and holy shit is it sincere. Perhaps overly so, but I'd much rather they take the swing than hold back out of embarrassment. Whether or not I found it excessive, it sets the scene for the game extremely well.
I'm 10 hours in just starting Act 2 and I'm comfortably of the opinion that the devs are in control of the story, that I can stop trying to predict what's going to happen next - they've got this in hand.
What a fucking video game.
If I had a criticism to draw, it's that their character designs are not the most distinct. The women are all built very similarly, but the men are even worse - all with the same kind of dark hair, beards, and builds. It's not game-breaking, but it does make it hard to tell if people look similar on purpose when they all look the same.
Expanding my Japanese Indie music experience
After getting really into haku. I've branched out a tad, giving proper listens to multiple bands that the algoriths spit out alongside them. I need to do something a bit more proactive than that, but this is a start.
Of those, Split end feel like they've hit the least success on the platforms I can easily access, but I think TEENAGER might be my favourite song I've heard this year. The EP it comes on feels like an exploration of that sound, but imo it's the only song from it that really nails the energy it needs, midnight moon is kind of a more lowkey approach to the same vibe and it doesn't work half as well.
idk it's hard to put my finger on why these bands are appealing right now, but I'm enjoying music a lot more than normal.
UK TERF (April 2025 wave) update - Brigitte Empire video
I mentioned in the last array that the UK Supreme Courts had done a bigotry, and that I'm not supremely well placed to speak on it. Brigitte Empire has done a good summary of events, which has enough distance in time from the ruling to cover the full context and fall-out while also having a view to the future of the situation.
There's some room for optimism that this might get struck down via the European Human Rights court, but it relies on a lot of institutional powers looking to undermine the UKSC at a time when that's not really politically appetising. Some path is better than no path, however.
I mentioned in my recent mini-posts post that I'd been playing AC: Shadows, and that I really didn't like it from the first few hours. Well, I've played another 6 or so hours and I'm done with it, it's just a shocking display of unchecked budgets and a complete lack of direction.
More than anything though, it's just incredibly unpleasant to interact with. Every menu has these long flourishes, you're expected to compare trousers constantly but the default pause menu is the map, so you have to tab to the inventory every time.
Gear is just relentlessly thrown in your face, but getting it out of your inventory is genuinely soul-crushing, with a 2s long "ITEM STORED/DISMANTLED/YEETED" animation every single time to make sure you know the game did what you asked using the buttons they provided.
The first "legendary" outfit I got looked really cool but had a """bonus""" ability that made me through a kunai at the nearest enemy anytime I did a stealth kill - which made stealth really fucking hard? For my shinobi????
I had to kill a guy who had 4 health segments, but my assassinations only do 3 segments of damage - then I realised I had a different hat that gives me +1 segments on all assassinations... so I stood in front of him, switched hats, then stabbed him and his friend in the neck.
| Clip misses the moment I spot that I can only take out 3/4 of his health.
I later got into a fight and sure, I know the shinobi isn't meant to be doing pitched battles, but I still expect it to be fun. Not here though.
I'm struggling with the targeting - there's no visual reference for who you're aiming best I can tell? So I'm getting my ass beat. I recognise it's getting away from me, so I try to change over to my smoke bombs for a classic escape.
I dodge and hit L1+DDown to change to smokes, L2 to aim and move the right stick... no movement. I'm still locked on, even when I try to manual aim. I click off, try again, and throw a kunai. I didn't change to smokes? I parry and dodge again, holding L1 and realise I can't change item until I have completely stopped moving. I mash DDown to change, try to throw one aaaaand I'm dead. It's all just so hideously unresponsive.
Oh, and then the game crashed.
But it's not just combat. Walking around - using Hold R3 to activate "Eagle Vision" (not lampshaded with an actual bird in this game, btw, gave up on that one already) feels terrible, the camera always feels like it's looking to the side of what I want, the objective screen is an interesting approach but tracked objectives don't auto-update to the next stage of an objective chain, so I've interacted with that screen more than I have with Yasuke 12 hours in!
The inventory stuff above sucks, but also the whole weapon idea is insane - you have 3 weapons and can only equip 2, but you can swap them mid-combat??? And they have special utility that you need them equipped to use, like special assassination methods!
It's drudgery for the sake of calling it a "mechanic". Oh, we have "loadouts" now, make sure to "share" your "build" on "social media". Great "content" to go with the "weekly objectives". Spend 2 "mastery points" for 2% more damage at night. Do it 2 more times. Now do it for 2% extra armour damage 3 times!
| Obligatory tierlist
I had a quick check and this is the 12th AC game I've played properly (i.e. not just a quick check on an emulator for the DS games), and it's only the 2nd I haven't enjoyed for what it is and finished. The previous was Origins, but I didn't necessarily dislike that game - it was just incredibly dull. It was directionless and empty and there were a bunch of ideas that were clearly there to make the game slower and less refined, to make you play more and conceivably pay more, when Ubisoft were first ramping up that approach to their games.
In between I really enjoyed Odyssey and Valhalla - still pleeeeenty of filler and drudge, but they were games with some fucking ideas - Odyssey was just delightful to explore and navigate even if the quest design was bad, and Valhalla did a lot to streamline and improve the questing! While the exploration became dull again... there's not a lot you can visually do with middle ages England.
AC:Shadows feels like a return to that Origins vapidity. The world is incredibly empty for how beautiful it is, traversal feels terrible considering this is a parkour series at its core, and quests are just... kinda thinly spread around it. But worse than Origins, it just plays like shit! And this is on the 4th iteration of this "genre" of AC game! How do you get worse at this over time???
Shadows feels like a game built from the ground up by people who can only communicate by analogy to games that have made $1B+ dollars. Like with Veilguard all the artists are absolutely killing it here, producing some excellent music and beautiful visuals for a game that barely functions.
I don't understand how anybody with a passion for game design could spend more than the 12 hours I did with it.
It confounds me to see these such resources piled onto this expansive, vapid "content".
This really deserves more words, but I'm not in a great position to do so eloquently. The UK Supreme Court has thrown its lot in with the TERF ruling class](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g27n80lnjo), undermining any claim they could ever have had that they were some kind of underdog. Decades of work expanding and refining our collective understanding of how biology, psychology, and culture interact has been reduced to a handful of literal Lords and Ladies putting their thumb to the air and going "well you're not really a woman, eh?"
Actual scum.
The ruling is pretty clear in its text that it isn't defining the concept of "woman" any more widely than the specific case it claimed to adjudicate - the Scottish Government's attempt to formalise the legal womanhood of trans women, but this falls down for 2 reasons - first because that's not how literally fucking anyone is reporting on it including the Equalities and Human Rights Commision, and second because the case they're adjudicating is very explicitly about the broad legal status of trans women. You can't just claim that's narrow! This is all tiki taka procedural lib shit, but it's also true!
I am furious beyond measure about all of this, but more than anything with the EHRC immediately going around all goverment organisations and warning them that if they don't start fucking up the lives of trans women immediately, they're getting fined.
I have so much anger, and fear, and sympathy for trans people in the UK, this whole thing sickens me and I hate that it's going this way.
York is nice though
Right, to bring the mood back in order - we went to York last week! Very nice city, a ton to see and do and the weather was downright resplendent. Most of our time was spent in museums, restaurants, or walking about - I can recommend York for all three.
| Yorkshire Museum Gardens, and the ruined abbey
It's a shockingly walkable city, really. Just the right size for an aimless wander and always something to see or do. The history really is very cool, with a ton of Roman and Viking stuff around.
Museum ranking:
Yorkshire Museum (Free, by the way)
Jorvik Visitor Centre
York Minster
Clifford's Tower
York Castle Museum
Clifford's Tower isn't really a museum, but it has some cracking views for £9. The Yorkshire museum is just a massive highlight for me - free entry as a National Museum, nice variety of exhibits - dinosaurs, maps, books, people, a ruined abbey, romans, vikings - a bit of everything, really nicely paced, and with lots of space for kids. It doesn't feel perfunctory, they want kids in there. And the gardens outside (pictured above) are just a delight in the sun.
The Jorvik viking experience is a classic, and the ride through viking York is an absolute delight.
The only downer really was the York Castle Museum. Not cheap, and very "this is what museums are supposed to have" in its tone. It felt a bit flag-shagger, with a lot of military stuff and those dungeon exhibits that are like "oh wasn't the past terrible, aren't you lucky to live in the now?"
York Minster is just spectacular tbh. A gorgeous building to look at, which is handy because you can see it from fucking everywhere. The prayer-adjacent stuff does nothing for me, but you can see why folk thought a god was involved 700 years ago.
Overall though, top notch city. Far from cheap, but with how much you can walk it you do end up saving a fair bit on day-to-day travel. They do a full museum-pass thing for £65 a head, which is about what we ended up paying across all the stuff we paid to see.
Definitely worth visiting!
Started playing AC:Shadows - crock of shit so far
Look, I've been ill and AC games are like comfort food - I know they're bad for me, but I don't have the energy to prepare vegetables.
I've only played the first hour or so, but what a pile of dross. Just incredibly by the book storytelling, very little interactivity, and that classic Ubisoft "you'll enjoy yourself when we're done queuing up tutorials" pacing.
Yasuke's prologue was fine I guess? It jumps through time a lot to get to the point, which I at least appreciated.
Naoe's prologue section comes after Yasuke's, and it was just a comedy of incompetence to me. Her dad sending her to get the macguffin then immediately showing up after it's stolen, the "I won't send you to get hurt, but here infiltrate this fortification" medicine lady, the utterly disconnected details around the white mask - I hate this sort of nitpicky stuff normally because you can kind of gloss over it and enjoy, but it's relentless! Nothing makes sense unless you just accept that nothing is true until a character says it, ignore what the camera is telling you at all times.
There's a moment in the stealth tutorial bit where they demonstrate light and shadow, and how you can put out lanterns to make more darkness to hide in. Cool, they used the title! Then 30s later you go into a room to check if the box is there, and there are candles flanking it. You walk over to the box and an interaction pops up - you can extinguish the left candle. Aha! Time to make shadows!
No, of course not you fucking buffoon. You can only interact with the left one. The right candle is fucking eternal, obviously.
| Eternal flame
This sort of thing is extremely forgivable in a small game, or like 60 hours into a big budget one like this, but we're in the shadowy stealth tutorial!
Then after the big villain reveal, we finish the prologue then immediately of course we jump to a flashback for some more tutorial. It was in media res all along! Haha! Fucking hell just tell the story in order, I assure you I'll care more about the tragic happenings of the prologue if I know who the characters are first.
Honestly, I don't know why I do this to myself.
Getting back into Binding of Isaac - what a game
I've been playing BoI a ton in the last few weeks - low energy and the need to listen to podcasts rather than music have me back on the grind. Honestly, few games are better suited to pairing with podcasts or audiobooks. I've listened to entire Peter Hamilton books while playing Isaac.
I never really got hugely into Repentence when it was new - I'd already 100% afterbirth+ when it came out and the stuff I needed to do was a bit repetitive, and I never really clicked with the tainted characters.
Coming back to it I've cleared a bunch of them, and got really into Tainted Lost - I only have a handful of megabosses to do - Mother, Beast, Megasatan. My last run would have easily handled Megasatan if I'd managed the key pieces, but so it goes.
I dunno, there's just something about Isaac that keeps me coming back time after time. They really nailed the roguelite balanced-imbalance thing.
I hate the modern game ecosystem - Eternal Strands has a Free Content Update
They just released a free update with a whole new late-game area and boss, and I just don't understand who this is for. I loved ES but I'm not coming back for like 2 hours of stuff they felt they could give away for free!
| Cool bird, I guess?
The game only came out about 3 months ago, and it's hard to avoid the feeling that Yellow Brick are committing hard to doing things "The Modern Way" immediately after releasing an extremely old-school kind of game. I haven't played since Feb, but they've apparently "tightened up movement" which I hate the sound of, added a tips-and-tricks hub which kind of removes the fun of looking at what other people are doing, and they just added the ability to dye gear to any colour.
This last one seems mundane, but I absolutely loved how the colour of my gear reflected what it was made of - it's such a rare thing to see that done well, and now they've undermined to (presumably) stop people whining. It was a really fun late-game activity to go hunting for a good farming spot for rare materials, and they weren't actually particularly slow farms once you found them! It feels like they've just made that part of the game pointless, idk.
I just don't like the idea that ES is now a completely different game than the one I fell in love with at launch. And not all the changes are bad! The inventory/death system seems way less silly now. But my review from launch is now not really reflective of the game as it is now, and for what? Who's still playing? What do you even gain from more players?
The modern games industry is built around these signifiers of a game being "alive" and "supported" by the devs, but this feels like a slavish supplication to those expectations. "We are releasing new content so that our investors will see the positive article on gamesradar" just doesn't sit right with me when you've made a medium-length single-player action game. No, it doesn't help that it was designed by a Final Fantasy guy.
This is just wasted effort when they could be working on something more substantial, but I suppose it probably didn't require much involvement from the writers? idk man, who's this for????
I'm not a very discerning music listener, and honestly I can go months without listening to music. I'm trying to remedy this, get back into music in a way that works with my never-commuting lifestyle, and my plan with this format is to just catalogue and share some of the music that keeps me going on it.
I first heard haku. from one of mrfb's Music Friday posts, halfway through my background listening there's this very fun sounding Japanese song that grabbed my attention.
This is haku.'s cover of a song by Mono No Aware, a collection of japanese tongue twisters, and it rules. Off the back of this I check out both bands, and then spend the next week or so just listening to haku. and remembering what it was like to be getting into music as a teenager.
Their back catalogue is just full of jangly guitar's, fun vocals, and killer melodies. I really have nothing but praise for it - it first put me in mind of The Pillows, a band I listened to a ton after watching FLCL, but I also get a strong sense of The Smiths off it. I'm not sure exactly where from though, might be the little non-melody bridges they throw into some songs.
Anyway, here's a small collection of my favourites from them, though I find their albums very listenable start-to-finish. Enjoy!
Saw Kyle's post about the feeling that there's some kind of cheat code people must be using to be effortlessly successful under capitalism.
In the spirit of that post this is a pretty short one (for me that's 500 words???), but reflected something I've been thinking about lately - how much our lives and systems are dominated by bad-faith actors.
An example I've probably mentioned before - when I was a kid, there was a boy who realised that he could go to the shop before school, buy soft drinks and sweets, then sell them at a significant mark-up during breaks (when we weren't allowed to leave the school grounds), because people came to school with lunch money.
That boy thought he was a genius, but any reasonable person would recognise that he's kind of an asshole.
To give a non-financial example, in the last decade of Formula 1 there has been a significant shift in how the racing itself is performed and regulated, with there being a pretty strong consensus that it's all become a bit rules-lawyery. The case I'd make here is that there was a generally accepted set of norms that, even if they were technically legal, people wouldn't fully exploit at every opportunity because it's generally viewed as "bad racing." Perhaps you'd occasionally find yourself moving a biiiit too much while defending and get the benefit - someone would have a word with you and it'd be dealt with.
Then along comes a driver like Max Verstappen, an incredible talent who knows the rulebook perfectly and will perform extreme acts of risk-reward that don't fall foul of regulations, any time the opportunity presents itself - moving a lot while defending or braking, extremely late lunges into disappearing gaps, that sort of thing. The rules don't explicitly forbid this stuff, but now it's deciding nearly every race.
It leaves the system with a choice - regulate every single thing that might be done and give up on expecting "norms" to keep people right, or let this subversive actor run rampant and risk every other driver following suit.
It seems obvious that you'd want to stop "bad behaviour" but F1 kind of shows why you might hesitate to just regulate your way out of it - they did eventually start changing and refining the rules to stop what Max was doing, and everyone kind of hates it. Arguing over millimeters about whether a pass was illegal just isn't what racing is about. The obvious solution has made things quite sterile.
I think this same idea is pretty generalisable - in the financial sector you are monstrously rewarded for exploiting loopholes good-faith actors wouldn't consider, and in business things have become so abstracted that norms basically can't apply. Looking at systems I consider broken and identifying how bad faith actors might be responsible is something of a habit now.
Meanwhile normal people like us follow the rules as they understand them, engaging with the system in good faith. Saving money in bank accounts, minimising debts, living within our means.
I guess that makes us rubes, but if I did the sorts of things rich people do with their money I'd be an asshole.
Myself and some workmates are big enough fans of the game to go see it live - it's a great time, I get to hang out with a group of people who live hundreds of miles away and take part in what is undeniably a fantastic crowd experience.
It was going to be my third RLCS LAN (after the RLCS S5 Finals in 2018 and the London Major in 2024) and my second with this group, but unfortunately trains in the UK are absolute dogshit these days.
This is the second cross-border trip I've planned in the last year that has been killed within 50 miles of my house. Hell, last time I didn't even make it to the train station a 5 minute walk from home before my (only possible) train got cancelled.
This one was weird though - I was checking trains all morning, everything was fine - I had a 30 minute transfer in Edinburgh which seemed reasonable, got a bite of lunch and a coffee and sat down to learn my train to Birmingham was 45 minutes late. This is annoying but workable, so I eat my meal-deal and watch some of the RLCS matches happening, get myself in the mood for the 6 hours of travel ahead of me.
Then I get a notification telling me that part of my trip has been cancelled - part of it? It's a train journey, how does part of it get cancelled? Turns out they decided to skip a handful of stops (to make up time? idk it'd let them skip Birmingham entirely) including the one I needed. I could harp on for ages about the logistics here (and I did in a previous draft, before even I was rolling my eyes at myself) but in the end I decided not to go, and headed back home for a long weekend watching the Rocket League.
It might seem like a rash, tantrum-y decision but I had one really good reason - my stop was the fucking Airport station. If they're cancelling the airport station on a long-distance train, something's fucked and that 45 minutes is just the beginning of the delays. Add to that a generally knocked confidence in the trains today, and I just didn't fancy being stranded somewhere in the west midlands without dinner.
I was vindicated in the end, the train is running 90 minutes behind, and I'd be getting into Birmingham way too late to get any kind of food or drink where I'd be staying.
This is kind of a strange post for me - really just a rant about a bad public transport experience, the most common rant imaginable. But there was a time not that long ago that this degree of failure felt anomolous, worthy of comment. I used to rely heavily on these London-Scotland trains multiple times a year, and I had only 1 event remotely comparable to this - and that one still got me where I was going within a couple hours of scheduled, I just had to stand for the 5 hour trip.
God I miss being young enough that standing for 5 hours was a minor compromise.
It feels like trains have purposely been made worse to justify shitting on them as a mode of transport. They feel actively hampered by their status as the obvious way to go from city-to-city, this politically convenient demonstration of the failure of public services (while being run by private companies, mind you) that everyone agrees are dogshit and need optimised.
I still believe trains are the best way to travel any significant distance within the UK, but for my next trip beyond York I'm going to have to consider flying as a much more serious option than I currently do - and I hate flying.
Oh, and insult to injury - the 45 minute train back home cost £11.20??? Daylight robbery I tell you.
I've been binging Kill Six Billion Demons this last week, having been vaguely aware of its existence for years but never taking the step to actually read it before now. I saw Bigg mention it in one of his updates (site is highly NSFW, this post isn't though) and uhhh...
Yeah I'm not kidding about binging. It's really great stuff, and is now into its (probably) final arc, so it seems to me like a good time to jump in with both feet and get on the watching-your-rss-feed-for-updates train. While I can nitpick about pacing or writing decisions, it's very clearly a passion project and Abbadon really doesn't leave anything off the page - it's pretty sumptuous stuff. You can read it here: Kill Six Billion Demons. (Just going to killsixbilliondemons.com takes you to the latest page, this is a link to page 1 to avoid spoilers)
I'll give some warning that some of the comments on the early posts are from people re-reading and commenting on foreshadowing they notice, but past the first chapter that's largely gone - which is great, because they have a really fun comments section over there. One of the best I've seen, tbh.
Wirtual posted a new video and it's a big one, centering on some of the most extensive deception and shithousery I've ever seen in an online community. You can watch it here, and I encourage you to do so. The bulk of the accusations and and evidence are in the first half, with the second half being more about the wider deception and unhinged behaviour.
Much less general terms used below the cut, and I'll be assuming you watched at least the first 5 minutes of the video.
Holy fuck.
Look, we've known since the initial cheating scandal in 2021 (video here, report here) that players will go to extremely weird lengths to deal with accurate accusations of cheating rather than face a mountain of evidence head-on. We saw that while Techno basically learned of the evidence and admitted his guilt with minimal pushing, riolu tried to generate a hate campaign to discredit the report before it was released. When that failed all of his online accounts went dark, and the base assumption was that he was running away and that he and the community were going to move on.
Boy, was that assumption wrong.
I was howling with laughter at the first half of the video, how sad and silly the whole situation was and how incredibly specific it all was to just this one fucking guy. Literally being able to point to a specific rare controller that he specifically owns and basically nobody else does... christ it was beautiful. Hilarious. Poetic even?
But now we know riolu has committed actual crimes out of spite over this whole situation - doxxing mizu is just a weird fucking move. Wirtual theorises that it could just be spite towards them, but I understand the timeline correctly (and put on my tinfoil-hat) he could also have been trying to implicate blackq in retaliation for trying to doxx him? blackq is known for both smurf accounts and trolling mizu, and copped the bulk of the blame for that incident. That incident which was a criminal act.
Adding that he used an actual real-life friends actual real-life name as a moniker? This guy is an actual fucking danger to know.
I have a pretty hard line view on cheaters and generally for people who violate online community norms in a major way - ban em, move on. It's a good thing I don't run any communities! This isn't a view I think should be the default, but I will advocate for it when called upon for my opinion.
It has been wrong in the past - I've seen speedrun cheaters take some time away and come back as committed non-cheaters in a different game and openly talk about how stupid their behaviour was, becoming advocates against that kind of behaviour. Half of the greatest players in Rocket League got done for account sharing because they were too young to compete - young people do stupid shit.
But riolu has a truly fucked pattern of behaviour, and Nadeo (the company that makes TM) need to be way more proactive dealing with him. I don't entirely disagree with their initial stance on his 92BOB account in the abstract - he's not cheating and he's not active in the community, so live and let live - but they should have been checking in on his behaviour regularly. They have access to all the same data (AND MORE) Wirtual used to show his account spamming, they just never thought to use it. It's just not good enough.
God this is so exhausting. This one guy just ruining so much because he couldn't handle a simple apology. Couldn't accept defeat against a mountain of evidence.
Fuck riolu, man.
Bit of a rant-post! Not my usual jam on this site but I don't think there's a fully reasoned way to talk about this beyond just pointing at Wirtual's video and sighing. Back to normal "enjoying my hobbies" posts shortly.
My partner works as a teacher, and if you didn't know that's a pretty insecure line of work in Scotland at the moment. She's spent a while out of work this last year so I got very into the habit of waking up whenever the fuck I felt like it as long as I got online before my work's core hours started at 10. It was irregular and honestly didn't spark joy. I'm hard to wake up at the best of times, but without a routine it's even worse - it's genuinely like waking up from anaesthesia some days.
She's back at work now, and on real teacher time now - waking up at 5:30 and leaving the house an hour or so later. This isn't too far from how we used to do things when we lived in London, but starting back into this routine in the middle of Scottish Winter has been rough after months of rolling out of bed at 9. I was struggling with it for the first few weeks, but I think I've found a routine that works now.
The first key thing is that I organise the food. The first thing I do when I wake up is make my partner breakfast - and I mean the first thing. I do not stop to think until the tea is brewing. On days when I've actually got a clean kitchen and my faculties in check this might mean scrambled eggs, but generally the gift of breakfast is that she hasn't had to make it so it's just vital that I provide something. Sometimes I wake up closer to 6 so it's good to have some quick options available, but I can get from waking up to a full cooked breakfast with tea in 7 minutes these days.
Once that's sorted I'll handle any ablutions and get dressed - no getting back into bed, that way lies madness. This is where the second key comes into play - I don't actually have food or coffee until after 8am. I find this opens up the morning for other tasks, walks, trips to the shop, whatever. Lately, that's meant tuning into the top division and a half or so of the Grand Sumo Basho (Midnight Sumo has been a godsend this week). It also stops me getting too hungry before lunch, because I've learned in the past that makes me fucking miserable.
I'm able to start my work as early as 7:30 and have it be properly on the clock, so I do that, and it gives me such a long run-up to my day compared to my colleagues that it reminds my why I used to be in the office at 8. Nobody complains about me logging off at 4pm when they haven't been online before me in months.
The part that's easier than I thought it'd be is getting to bed at a reasonable hour. Used to be I was fucking feral, clawing for every minute of wakefulness before I have to sleep - and by extension, wake up for work. Now that I can take like 3 hours to get ready for work in the morning should my mood call for it, I'm way happier to get into bed and settle down before 10pm. Hell, I just saw the clock hit 20:00 and thought "maybe I should finish this in the morning?"
Changed days.
I'm broadly a lot happier with this routine, but the one downside is that the tiredness I feel in the afternoon is actual bodily fatigue rather than the previous "all I've done today is work" exhaustion I'd get rolling out of bed to my desk still in my jammies. There's something about having to fight off actual nap impulses in a boring 3pm meeting that I do not like - sets my teeth on edge to be visibly sleepy at work. I'm working on that with probably-too-much coffee, and upping my water intake.
I might be able to resolve it longterm by just getting good at being up early. It's a shame that literally everything in my life points to a terminal inability to form habits.
I scouted hotels, considered prebooking but decided I dislike the red-tape of cancellations more than missing out on options, and bought the "friends of the RAH" membership so I'd get access to ticket presales.
Then my partner learned that a friend from Hong Kong was moving to London this summer, and our plans coalesced - now even without sumo tickets, we can justify the trip. The Basho is during her holidays anyway so it was always planned as a trip together, but now there was an option if tickets were prohibitively expensive - just buy one, and she goes and gets sushi with her friend that day. Sumo is very much my obsession right now, not hers.
So we decided that we would play it by ear, and this morning I got into the queue, got given a terrible spot at random (600th in line, eesh), and had a whole host of website bugs before getting access to the Sunday (final day) tickets, where all the best value seats were already taken. I moaned a bit, then grabbed what looked like the two next best seats for the optimal price we agreed on.
Bugs notwithstanding, it went well and I'm extremely stoked for October now! Moreso than for the Rocket League LAN I'm going to in 3 weeks - there's something about the way this whole thing came together, natural contingencies keeping my nerves at bay. I hate online ticket purchasing these days, and this would have been horrible had I not been comfortable losing out.
Anyway, if you're interested yourself, general sale goes up on Friday 7th March at 10am, and you can find the link to the main page here.
I finished Eternal Strands this weekend, really loved it and knew while I was playing it that I had a lot to say about it, especially around the efficiency of the whole thing.
Decided to structure my post a bit, do some 0th draft rough notes to outline things - it's already 1000 words despite the knowledge that the line "omg i nearly forgot the tempering mechanic" will be a whole section on its own.
This one's gonna take some time, I think. Might be a multi-parter.
I started watching Sumo in November. I'd seen it on TV when I was visiting Japan a few years ago and didn't think too much of it then, but as someone with a vague interest in spectating various forms of wrestling I was always vulnerable to mild obsession like this, should it become easy for me to access.
Anyway as it turns out, NHK (the Japanese national broadcaster) posts highlights of the top division matches on YouTube every day, removing them when the next two-monthly* tournament starts.
So I tuned into the November tournament, got entirely hooked on it as part of my morning routine for 2 weeks, and started clapping when a match was good. This is who I am now.
The January Basho started last weekend, and already a bunch of stories are developing that makes 2025 look like an interesting year, if possibly a transitionary year.
A little groundwork
Sumo has a bunch of rankings, from the top couple of guys all the way down to the capable amateur. For our purposes, we're only really able to talk Makuuchi, the top 42 wrestlers, who are split into two main groups - maegashira (the rank and file) and the sanyaku (the current elite, generally less than 10 guys).
You win a bout by staying on your feet within the circle, and you lose by not staying on your feet or leaving the circle. There are intricacies beyond that, but nothing that you need to know to understand a typical bout.
The most important thing to understand is that a single tournament at makuuchi division involves all the guys doing 1 fight per day for 15 days, and the person with the best win-loss record wins the tournament. Some work is done to make sure nobody can win a tournement without facing the top ranked guys, but generally you wrestle those close to you in rank, and if you have a positive record (e.g. 9 wins 6 losses) you will probably rank up.
| The current rankings, from sumoreference - red outlines are new career high ranks
No Yokozuna
| The GOAT
The sanyaku are also split into different ranks but right now we only care about the top 2 - yokozuna and ozeki.
To work your way up the ranks in sanyaku you generally need to be more than just "not losing" - you need to be winning and looking good while you do it. Getting to ozeki typically requires a win-loss ratio of over 70% against the top of the makuuchi division for 3+ tournaments, and yokozuna requires a step above that with 80+% and also winning one of the last 3 tournaments.
Neither of these requirements are guarantees though, and the yokozuna promotion especially also requires them to get the OK from a committee who are also very concerned with how dignified a wrestler is - this can seem petty (and they absolutely have made some very dodgy calls on this in the past regarding foreign wrestlers), but yokozuna are the face of the sport so it's not entirely unreasonable.
The important part is that it's really fucking hard to get to yokozuna. There have been 42 promoted in the last hundred years, there's something of a drought going on right now. Hakuho (likely the greatest of all time) and Kakuryu both retired in 2021, leaving the newly-promoted and plagued-with-injury Terunofuji as the only yokozuna for the last 3 years.
| This is what a yokozuna's tournament record looks like
Of the 12 tournaments in 2023/24, he missed 6, retired from 3, and won the other 3 - because that's what yokozuna do, they win. He attempted to wrestle in this January Basho, but after a 2-3 record in his first 5 bouts he chose to accept the calls of his body and retire from wrestling leaving the sport without a top-ranked wrestler for the first time in over 30 years before Akebono was promoted.
This leads us to the next interesting detail.
A Japanese Yokozuna?
| The trio of Yokozuna Candidates
Akebono was Hawaiian, the first non-Japanese wrestler to be made yokozuna, and since his promotion things have been pretty bad for Japanese prospects - only 3 of the last 10 promotions have been Japanese wrestlers, and the only one of the 21st Century - Kisenosato - had a short career plagued with injuries.
Mongolia, with its rich tradition of similar wrestling, has dominated the rank since, with 5 of the last 6 promotions including the GOAT Hakuho. It's hard to feel like a country like Japan wouldn't be eager to find and promote any Japanese wrestler who seems capable of not embarrassing themselves in the role. Thankfully, that doesn't look like a problem in 2025.
There are currently 3 ozeki eyeing the possibility of promotion to the top rank -
Kotozakura - Winner of the November 24 Basho, a 3rd generation sanyaku (grandson of the 53rd yokozuna of the same name), and the top contender as of the start of this basho. While his results in September weren't spectacular he went 14-1 in November and with a similar showing in January he had a chance to get the kind of win-loss record required to go with his tournament win. His promotion would be a great win for "traditional" sumo.
Hoshoryu - A young Mongolian wrestler with already several years experience in makuuchi but only 1 tournement win from back in July 23. He and Kotozakura had a 13-1 final day match to decide the November tournament, and he will need a tournament win to have a chance at yokozuna promotion after the March tournament.
Ōnosato - Another young wrestler who went through the fairly common modern route to pro sumo via college sumo. The press loves this kid, and with good reason - debuting in January he won the May and September basho and was promoted to ozeki for the November tournament, where he stumbled slightly but maintained a solid 9-6 record. With a 14-1 record in January it'd be very plausible for him to see an incredibly rapid yokozuna promotion.
As I'm writing this halfway through the January event, I have some knowledge of the standings, but without spoiling things too much - we aren't seeing a promotion from this basho. As things drag on and Onosato's wins move out of the 3-month range, Kotozakura's will also and that leaves only Hoshoryu with a decent shot soon, provided he can clinch one event. It's very up in the air, and I wouldn't be shocked to see a couple of promotions this year if any of these guys can string some results together at the right moment.
Unfortunately I don't know enough about the wrestlers outside the sanyaku to say anything about the prospects lower down the track, but it's not looking like we have any dominant forces in the top division at the moment.
Wrap-up
I appreciate this is something of a special-interest dump with limited appeal, but if you're like me and susceptible to storylines then sumo is a very dangerous hobby. The sport has a ton of justified controversy and claims of corruption and abuse in its recent history, but the simplicity and tradition of it all is really hard to resist as a spectator. Beyond a few presentational changes, a basho looks almost identical to how it did 100 years ago, and the techniques used remain the same too. There's a magic to that.
Sumostew - A Concise Guide to Terunofuji - a great video from right before Terunofuji's promotion to yokozuna, charting his incredible recovery from knee surgery and the depths of sumo.
LuckyPyjamasTV - The Pride of Yokozuna: Hakuho's Lone Battle - A reupload of a documentary by NHK, released shortly after Hakuho's final tournament win and subsequent retirement. The video that caused YouTube's algorithm to recommend me NHK highlights.
* There's just no way I can bring myself to use a word as ambiguous as "bimonthly", and I have nothing better to offer than two-monthly and twice-monthly
I'm quite late to the retrospective party, but the end of 2024 was a bit rough for me - not in any serious way, I was just very preoccupied and low energy. This is just a little retrospective on last year, what I'm planning for 2025, and if the mood strikes I'll talk more about either in future posts.
On 2024
2024 was a fairly downward year for me in many ways. My health hasn't been fantastic, my mood has been commensurately challenging, and many of my bettering-myself goals have ended up in the bin. The only thing I've really managed to stick with is quitting social media, but the main upshot of that is that the exception I made - YouTube - consumes more of my time than it used to. Still nothing on my old Twitter habit, and I've blocked shorts and the like, but it's more than I'd like.
The loss of Cohost was a big shift in how I view my time, myself, and the relationship between the two. I wrote a lot about it at the time, and probably will again, but all I have for now is that it was the only good social media, and that I miss it and wish it could have survived.
A recurring issue has been migraines and the sorts of things that come with migraines, and it kind of took over my christmas, but I'm vaguely optimistic that it getting bad enough to need a hospital visit will actually lead to getting proper treatment - there's still no indication that this is anything grim or serious, but it sucks to lose dozens of days in a year to a single unclear cause, so I'm choosing hesitant positivity here that I'm turning a corner.
A big thing I've been doing this year is starting to learn Chinese using a daily-practice app called HelloChinese. I've definitely got a bit into the habit of gaming it to not lose my streak, but I'm starting to be able to chat very slowly and methodically with my partner, asking for drinks or calling her dumb names. I've purposely held off on moving past HSK1 until I have the mental energy to do some hanzi learning, because while it's not required until HSK3, I want to take this seriously.
My personal life has been mostly good - my partner and I have been together 15 years now and she's still my best friend, the only person I don't tire of. It's been a hard year for her career-wise though, and it's hard not to take on some of that burden on her behalf. Financially we're fine, but we moved back to Scotland in the hope of thriving, and a few years on it just hasn't come yet so she's feeling a need to pivot into an unfriendly economy. That's her story though, not mine.
My own professional life is in something of a holding pattern - I work in games, and after layoffs in 2023 the mood in the office has been low, and the stuff we've been able to release hasn't really brightened it. My own position within that has been very static, doing the bare minimum to not cause problems, but without any motivation to excel or show myself in a better light. The migraines have been a big part of that, but to be honest I'm not sure which way the blame goes here.
In entertainment it was kind of a flat year? I had some high hopes for big RPGs, and there were certainly some bangers, but honestly my heart wasn't really in it for big stories. I rediscovered some love for Rocket League though, cranking out about 350 hours in what's probably my biggest year since I was unemployed in 2018. Not a bad year by any standard, but not one I'm going to look back on with any awe. If I make a separate post about anything, it'll be games.
Other entertainment was a total bust though. This was probably a Me problem. For one, my NAS died and needed resurrected without my existing library, and a big part of that being a problem was the 6 months it took me to care. I've fallen behind on anime in a big way, and movies have been something of a non-factor for me this year. I've been getting into C-Dramas a bit, picking up some memes, dramatically calling my partner fūren and the like. Normal shit. It is a shockingly time-consuming hobby to have alongside games though, so it's not an easy one to maintain.
Overall, 2024 is one of the most also-ran years I've ever experienced.
On 2025
I've not got a lot planned for this year. While 2024 is an also-ran year by accident, 2025 is sort of planned as one?
My partner and I have some pretty big travel plans for 2026, but with how things are now it'll require a lot of careful saving and financial management, in a way we typically haven't bothered with. I'm even going so far as to restructure debt (not in a scary way, in a "I've been super fucking lax about this" way) to give us a better chance at paying for our whole own trip, rather than continuing to rely on parents for help in our 30s.
I'm also trying to more actively pursue non-computer hobbies, or less computer-obsessed ones. I've got a very dusty shed ready for woodwork, a brand-new half-frame film camera, and a bunch of thoughts that may culminate in a 3d-printer. I'm also enjoying cooking lately, and want to try to get back into that habit.
A small aside on cooking - there's a YouTube channel called SortedFood, and they've been diversifying their revenue streams away from just ads and sponsors over recent years. A big thing they do is an app called Sidekick, and I cannot recommend it enough. The premise is to bundle a trio of recipes with ingredients in common, and reduce the odds that you're left with a half-bag of spinach you have to through out at the end of the week. Not every recipe is a winner, some are clearly just bunging 3x as much coriander as they need to finish the packet, but overall I've had so much fun making these recipes, and it's mature enough now that there are literal hundreds of packs with various goals or gimmicks around speed, simplicity, or ingredients. I know this reads like it's sponsored but it's not, honestly I cannot help proselytising when it comes to Sidekick, it's really fucking good.
Anyway, games? Some good looking ones on the way. I'm sure I'll post about them when I play them. I don't have a lot of hype in me right now for new games, but I'm usually open to trying them so I'm ready to be surprised.
The big "resolutions" for the year are around how I structure my time for self-betterment stuff. I got very into the idea of returning to my roots as a physics student late last year, and decided to structure it a bit. I still have my (oh god) 15 year old intro uni physics textbook, and have decided to basically just put it in my brain. The goal for the year is to just spend time learning it. For 3 hours a week I go chapter by chapter, see if I can answer the test questions, and if not go back and learn it and try again. As I see it, however long this takes, I'll eventually have myself a pretty solid grasp of the topic again (thanks to Angela Collier for that one), and I'll know if I want to get into the the really dirty stuff (QED) that knocked me out of grad school and killed my love for academia.
I also want to commit more time and conscious effort to Mandarin, so alongside my 10-minutes a day app I'm committing 2 hours to actual study - be that vocab, hanzi, speaking or listening, just 2 hours of staying in the context a week.
You'll notice that's 5 hours total per week, and that's kind of the juice here - I've learned that I don't self-motivate well to do stuff at the weekend, so the plan is to keep them pretty sacred. This is intended as an hour of study per workday, between finishing work and dinner. Hopefully this can also break up my day a little, rather than just switching my monitor from showing the bad computer to showing the good computer, my usual routine.
I got a new Kindle this Christmas, and getting back into reading was a big goal of mine. I used to be a moderate reader, usually spending about an hour a day on my commute in London blasting through some scifi novel or other. But since I've gone remote I barely read anything that's not considered a Post in some way. I miss it, and having started back at it a week ago, I've gotten bad at reading. I never knew it was possible to get bad at something like that, but I really struggle to focus on the text in front of me. All that changes this year - I have no particular goal for book count or reading time this year, I just want to make my bedtime routine less about immediately putting a video on and more about actually turning my brain down.
I had a lot of ambition to run last year, but it fell apart somewhat because of a short illness and my inability to develop habits. I haven't fully figured out what I want to do this year, but I think I'll focus more on walking - I can walk to my parents' house in around 90 minutes. This is long enough that I can't just up and do it from my incredibly unfit state, but it's a simple target, and I can change the difficulty by just pacing up or down. My brother already does a 30 minute version of this every Saturday morning, so I might line it up with his.
Overall, I want to spend less time at the computer or TV vegetating this year. I don't mean time playing games or calling friends - that's fun and entertaining. I'm talking about scrolling YouTube for the vaguest sustenance. I don't miss that time when I do something else, but I lack the impetus to tear myself away most days. I'm hoping an externalised routine will help.
As I said, 2025 is sort of an intentional non-year. The goal is less to do big things, and more to enable myself to do big things in the future.
On This Website, and Others
I know I haven't been a particularly effective poster on here - I have ideas, but often I write half of it and leave it drafted as a "bad post", and leave it there. This is probably a bad habit, but I tend to get wordy (ignore the scrollbar, keep your eyes over here) and if I don't find a post breezily readable or intensely informative, I usually don't consider it worth posting. I can tell when I'm rambling, or lack a point.
But this isn't a marked essay, it's just a place to post shit. I didn't filter myself this much on Cohost, and this site is meant to reflect the spirit of my presence in that place. Something about having to access an Admin panel to post just makes it feel like it should be more.
So an additional resolution is to come up some kind of format for shorter posts I can just rattle out. I don't want to go full micro-blog, I don't value those chosts of mine particularly, but I had some good couple-hundred-word ones that I really liked. I want to be able to differentiate them, but I don't need a whole new area for it. Might dick around with tag filtering.
More than anything, I want to extend a thanks to everyone who's been posting in the last few months. I've been doing my best to keep up with the blogs, though I do have a small backlog since New Year - I mentioned my reading ability has tanked in recent years, and a large number of genuinely interesting posts has proven really hard for me to get through. I don't want to just mark them as read, I want to enjoy them. Because I've been enjoying them a ton since October, both people I interacted with regularly on Cohost and those I had missed in the network. It's not really about the who though, it's about the fact that you're posting.
The biggest motivation I have to break these posting droughts and put something out there is seeing other people doing the same. I notice when someone hasn't posted in a few weeks, and get a little buzz when they get round to it again. Beyond just being an outlet for my brain words, the only real goal I have for this site is that it does that for someone else. That they open their RSS in the morning, see I've posted, and think "oh hey, he's back".
I think that's what always-online social media has lacked compared to blogging. It's like being a bunch of infrequent pub-goers occasionally seeing each other and having a chat, or overhearing each others conversations. It's a comfy space that we come into in our own time, when we want to be in a shared space. There's no expectation or judgement if we don't want to be there for a while, for whatever reason. No need to always contribute to every conversation at the bar - but if you have something to say, you can pipe up and join in, even just for a couple of minutes.
Ah shit this is the start of my inevitable descent into proper old-man behaviour, isn't it?
Nothing makes me feel like a snob quite like seeing the choices people make with video encodes for file sharing.
Just came across a collection of Buffy episodes where the files are interlaced - which most playback software can thankfully handle these days. Unfortunately the file was 480p - they baked the interlacing into the video file.
So I can either put up with this, or spend some time fiddling with presets and crank these files through Handbrake - trading some quality for basic standards.
Something about using YouTube these days just feels hostile. Ads seem to have been cranked to 11, the content algorithm is relentless in showing me stuff I don't care about, and more and more it seems like new channels that do seem to interest me are all sizzle no sausage (as it were).
But that's content stuff - today I'm nitpicking the UI.
Basically, I might look at a thumbnail like this one:
And expect that I can click, broadly, anywhere on it to get to the video. Something like this:
Where the blue boxes take me to the video, and the green ones get me to the person's channel. Nothing complicated, everything visible and obvious.
But as soon as your cursor touches the image, everything changes, and the truth becomes this:
I've had to change the colour scheme to remove the actual "gets you to the video" parts - it's easier to just omit that.
Green gets you to the channel.
Purple stuff mostly appears when you hover over and they are controls rather than links - the preview video player necessitates all this and just makes the whole YouTube experience worse.
The little gold band is a gap between the thumbnail and the title for some reason? I've clicked on that gap more times than is reasonable, in attempting to avoid clicking on the progress bar and skipping half the video.
And the red part takes you to a page explaining what a paid promotion is for some reason.
Guys I just want to click on the video, why are you making this such a ball-ache? It's a full 10% (possible hyperbole, I'm not counting pixels) of the section allotted to the video, just wasted on cruft.
This is one of many UI/UX complaints I have about the site, but I'll leave it at that for now. I don't think anyone would choose to design a website like this from scratch, this stinks of iterative ruination.
Angela Collier posted a great (long) video about Richard Feynman, and specifically the version of Feynman that exists in the public consciousness. I'm not going to crib or spoil her notes on this, she has a far more insightful and well-researched set of opinions than I'm capable of writing all this off the top of my head, but while watching I was really intrigued by how it mirrored and differed from my own view of Feynman over the last couple decades based on the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!"
Early on Angela discusses how if you're a young American with an interest in physics, some adult will eventually encourage you to read Surely You're Joking because it's the only point of reference they have for "entertaining physics stuff". She was one of these young people, started reading it and thought "what an asshole" and never went back. Later she dealt with a lot of young men who loved Feynman's stories and were also massive assholes, so that view stuck. A big theme of this section is that stories of Feynman's misogyny - harrassing women, embarrassing a waitress, etc - are the ones that stuck. What I find interesting is that they're not what stuck for me.
A little background, I was a Physics student myself - not American, but online enough that Feynman was someone I was aware of as a character, such that I read Surely You're Joking when I was 16 or so. The various stories of him being a dipshit to and about women didn't really stay in my mind after reading- I was something of a dipshit myself, as a teenager, but not enough so that I thought they were cool - so my view on the man wasn't quite so dim, but it also wasn't pure admiration like is common. It's also worth noting that I was a pretty shitty student, so I also don't have a full appreciation for the man's work as a theorist.
For all the anecdotes in the book, only 2 really stayed in my mind after reading, enough that they're what I think of when I think of Feynman. I'm purposely not re-reading them to verify because I want this to be about my impressions of him, not a measurable truth.
The first is about his time at Los Alamos, where they were developing the atomic bomb, and his experience of finding that untrained maintenance people were storing waste in a potentially catastrophically dangerous way. As I recall, they were stacking things close together in a way that could potentially cause a meltdown. Crucially, these folks had no training or understanding of nuclear waste, didn't know that's what they were dealing with, and didn't know that Los Alamos was even working on such things - as far as they were concerned, this was just rubbish to be stored. I think his main point in telling this story was about how unfair it was to expect them to do better without proper information, and that the secrecy of the Manhattan Project was putting them in serious danger. I liked this story - it paints Feynman as quite aware of the people around him, and of his position in the machine he's operating. That even as a theoretical physicist, his work was putting real people in practical danger. That feels like a good lesson.
The second was about how, during one summer at college, he asked to intern-or-whatever in another department, Biology I think. While there he was basically a lab-assistant, helping with their work and learning how they do things. In this he spent most of his time handling test-tubes, and in doing so he became very adept at uncapping them one-handed, and jokes that because of that he gets to save a little bit of time every day when he brushes his teeth, because he can uncap and re-cap his toothpaste with one hand. I'm sure he had more to say about it, but that's what stuck with me. I think what he's getting at here is that if he had always been Physics-Physics-Physics, he'd never have learned this silly little thing that he enjoys and benefits from, and you should always be ready to broaden your horizons.
I'll be honest, I hated this story. It felt incredibly silly, and I was a Big Theory Boy so why would I want to spend that much time in a lab? This was a really silly view, but I was a teenager. Then I went to university, this story still rolling about in my mind, and I got a new negative insight: what kind of biology lab is letting a physics student get this valuable lab experience over one of their own students? It's simple, a 1930s lab. That's when it really clicked for me. Feynman's life lessons barely applied because he went to college in a completely different universe, where just going to university already made you an extreme outlier. You were worthy of the university's time simply because you were there. This isn't to say Feynman wasn't an incredible talent, but it just felt like the bar was immensely higher in the post-2008 era. I was seeing UK tuition fees quintuple for my younger friends, and a huge number of my peers were getting a degree out of necessity rather than passion. As students in we were gristle in the university machine, competition was fierce, and the expectation was that we'd get our 2:1 and fuck off.
To be clear, as I said I was a terrible student. Classic "gifted child doesn't know how to study" shit. Between anxiety, depression, and a life-threatening infection my motivation for academia waned hugely over time. I don't know that it'd be any different if degrees "meant more", whatever that means, but I do wonder if things might have gone differently if I had been born into the pre-inflationary era of academia. I was certainly born for higher education, extremely likely in any era to have studied for a Maths or Physics degree, so maybe I'd be an academic in the 30s?
Of course, in the 1930s I wouldn't have spent hundreds of hours playing Super Mario 64, so that might also have helped.
Anyway, I highly recommend the acollierastro video linked above. It got me thinking a lot about things I'd taken for granted about myself despite having changed a lot since I came to believe them. A funny idea in the context of the video itself, actually.
Back when I was starting out as a self-motivated capital-PCG PC Gamer, the most exciting thing in the universe was modding Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
I spent entire days installing massive overhauls, fixing my load order, and forgetting important steps in the install-guide - only to play 10 hours of a new file and feel the urge to change more. I had friends making utterly broken items and calling them "necessary fixes", or recommending a sword with 40,000 polygons in 2007. It's become a running joke at this point, but modding really was more of a hobby than actually playing the game.
| Pictured - absolute crack for 16-year-old me
I just kind of assumed that replays of PC games, especially RPGs, required mods to be interesting - surely I'd already exhausted what the base game had to offer on my first playthrough?
Reader, it's important on occasion to understand oneself to be a dipshit.
About a decade later, I was planning a third Witcher 3 playthrough - this time, I was gonna mod it to hell and back. HD textures, UI Fixes, Skill Tree Reworks, ReShade, Visual Effect mods, Combat Tweaks... I spent the best part of a day putting together 2 lists of mods - one for MUST HAVES, one for mods I wasn't going to do any hard work to install. And very quickly, I realised a decade of modding had caused my opinion on what "MUST HAVE" looked like - that list was all minor Quality of Life stuff, or removing trendy nonsense - Hiding the UI, no Minimap, Inventory Limit removers. The "maybe later" list contained all the stuff I used to consider utterly necessary but now considered a bit unnecessary.
This was, it must be said, a cause for some introspection.
I've come to the conclusion that Modding is, for the most part, an attempt to apply one's own design sensibilities onto someone else's work. "I think combat should be harder", "I think fights should be bloodier", "I think every woman in this game should have flawless hair", etc. Scan popular mods for major games of the last decade and almost every game has a "make your protag look like an Instagram influencer" mod in the top 20, because that's what people what their protagonist to look like - an extension of their own desired self-image and presence.
I think what's happened over the years is that my own preference has skewed hugely towards "let the game developers decide what's in the game" - Bethesda might have consistently terrible hair options but that doesn't mean I want to mod in hairspray and curling irons, there was a decision in there somewhere and I no longer feel the need to overrule them. Maybe I'll have some irritations with a game's design but I'm a bit more willing to stick with it and try things on their terms now. This isn't about me feeling superior - I just don't want the headache of adding instability to a game just to fix what may be a working system.
Not to say I don't still find mods interesting. A nice little insight into a very engaged corner of the player-base.
So I started playing Dragon Age 2 again recently, and had my usual "let's see what mods there are" scan of Nexusmods Most Endorsed mods and... Oh. Oh no.
Once you get past the 150 hours of RPG, the ill-health, ill-mental-health, working full-time, and the associated fatigue of all those things, there's still quite a lot of hours not accounted for by simple living.
So what did I do with that time?
Oh you know, just a [normal amount of solitaire].(https://criminallyvulgar.dev/the-zachtronics-solitaire-collection-is-really-good/).
| Obligatory tierlist
| Yorkshire Museum Gardens, and the ruined abbey
| Eternal flame
| Cool bird, I guess?
| A handy ranks chart, grabbed from 
| The current rankings, from 
| The GOAT
| This is what a yokozuna's tournament record looks like
| The trio of Yokozuna Candidates
I've had to change the colour scheme to remove the actual "gets you to the video" parts - it's easier to just omit that.
Green gets you to the channel.
Purple stuff mostly appears when you hover over and they are controls rather than links - the preview video player necessitates all this and just makes the whole YouTube experience worse.
The little gold band is a gap between the thumbnail and the title for some reason? I've clicked on that gap more times than is reasonable, in attempting to avoid clicking on the progress bar and skipping half the video.
And the red part takes you to a 
| Pictured - absolute crack for 16-year-old me
